Citrus and Regret

The papaya sat in my cart like an accusation. I'd never bought one before—she was the one who liked exotic fruits, who dragged me to farmers markets and made me try things I couldn't pronounce. Three months after she left, and I still reached for them automatically.

The fluorescent lights of the grocery store gave everything a sickly tint. I abandoned the cart near the oranges—too many memories packed into those pyramids of citrus. Our first date involved stealing oranges from her neighbor's tree at midnight. We were thirty-two and drunk on possibility, running through sprinklers like teenagers, the juice running down our chins as we laughed at our own boldness.

Now I was forty-one, and the oranges just reminded me of how quiet the house had become.

Outside, the heat hit like a physical weight. I'd started going to the community pool at dawn, swimming laps while the sky turned that bruised purple color between night and day. There was something meditative about it—the rhythmic breathing, the way the water muffled everything until I could almost pretend the world didn't exist. Almost.

The lifeguard, maybe twenty-five with tattoos that climbed up her neck like ivy, watched me with what I assumed was professional concern. "You're here every day," she said last week. "Running from something or swimming toward it?"

I hadn't known how to answer. Still didn't.

My phone buzzed. *You left your baseball glove,* she'd texted. *Also, I think I'm seeing someone.*

The glove had been a gift from my father, who taught me to catch before he taught me to tie my shoes. We'd gone to dozens of games together, those sun-drenched afternoons at the stadium when time seemed to stretch and compress all at once, when the crack of the bat meant something elemental about hope and failure and trying again.

I texted back: *Keep it.*

Then I drove to her apartment complex, standing in the parking lot like an idiot. Through the window, I could see them—she was showing him how to slice a papaya, her hands moving with that careful precision she used for everything she loved. He was laughing, and she was smiling in that way she hadn't smiled at me in years.

The world kept spinning. People kept buying oranges and swimming laps and falling in love with new people who didn't have all the wrong habits yet.

I got back in my car and drove toward the community pool. It wasn't open yet, but I sat on the hood watching the sky brighten, thinking about how sometimes the only way forward was through water, how you had to keep moving or you'd sink, how the shore you started from wasn't the shore you'd end up at anyway.